


Relax and Let Go

by yunyu



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Aaron Davis Lives, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Earn Your Happy Ending, For Want of a Nail, Gen, Growth, Humor, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Jewish Peter Parker, Miles Morales Needs a Hug, Reconciliation, Redemption, Women Being Awesome, you know what that is?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:35:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26920747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yunyu/pseuds/yunyu
Summary: “Go. Destroy the collider. I'll come and find you. It's gonna be…” Spider-Man trailed off, his weakly waving hand flopping to one side. “Are you... stuck?”“Oh my gosh, why is this happening again?!” Miles said, grabbing at the rebar with his other hand and promptly getting it stuck as well. Voices were getting louder, coming closer, and lights were pointing towards them. “Unstick! Unstick, Miles!”--When Miles is too stressed to unstick from RIPeter's side, Prowler rescues his nephew. Things snowball from there.
Relationships: Aaron Davis & Miles Morales, Miles Morales & Gwen Stacy, Peter B. Parker/Mary Jane Watson
Comments: 17
Kudos: 168





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm tagging this gen even though there is some obvious PBP/MJ content because it's not really focused on their relationship at all.

Miles scrambled through the dusty ruins, trying to be as quiet as possible. The air smelled absolutely awful, like it would give you lung cancer in about ten minutes, but he took in a deep, gulping breath when he got past the massive corpse of Green Goblin and saw what looked like another, much smaller corpse: Spider-Man.

But then Spider-Man coughed and moved a little, and while it didn’t sound good, it gave Miles hope. He ran to the fallen hero’s side, pushing off rubble. “Hey! Are you okay?”

“I'm fine, I'm fine. I'm just resting.” It was said like a joke, but this was the least funny situation Miles had ever been in.

“Can't you get up?” Miles said. The metal beneath his knees felt weirdly warm. He’d gotten everything off of Spider-Man, so why wasn’t the hero standing up?

“Yeah. Yeah, I always get up.” Spider-Man tried to chuckle, but then his one visible blue eye squeezed shut in pain as it became a cough instead. “Coughing's probably not a good sign.”

There were noises all around, getting louder. People shouting, calling orders.

“Listen, we gotta team up here, we don't have that much time. This override key is the only way to stop the collider.” Spider-Man put a USB stick into Miles’s palm and closed his hand around it. “Swing up there, use the key, push the button and blow it up. You need to hide your face. You don't tell anyone who you are. _No one can know._ He's got everyone in his pocket. If he turns the machine on again, everything you know will disappear. Your family, everyone. _Everyone._ Promise me you'll do this.”

Miles felt like he might faint, throw up, hyperventilate, have a seizure—surely his body was gonna crumble, because the responsibility of the USB stick felt a hundred times as toxic as the dust in the air. He was already on his knees, but his empty hand clutched at a piece of metal rebar too, as if he was worried there was further to fall.

_I can’t do this. I can’t possibly do this._

_But I’m the only one here._

“I promise,” Miles said, and shoved the USB stick in his hoodie’s inner pocket. He thought that making the decision would help break the panic, but when Miles tried to push up on the rebar to stand up, his hand wouldn’t let go.

“Go. Destroy the collider. I'll come and find you. It's gonna be…” Spider-Man trailed off, his weakly waving hand flopping to one side. “Are you... stuck?”

“Oh my gosh, why is this happening again?!” Miles said, grabbing at the rebar with his other hand and promptly getting _it_ stuck as well. Voices were getting louder, coming closer, and lights were pointing towards them. “Unstick! Unstick, Miles!”

_I can’t do this! I can’t do this! I can’t do this!_

“It’s okay, you just need to relax your fingers. I had the same problem when I started, just try to,” _loud deathbed cough,_ “relax!”

“I can’t relax when I’m about to die!”

“I’d say it’s nice to see you again, Spider-Man,” a gruff voice began, then switched tones to something confused instead of confident. “Where’d the kid come from?”

Miles looked back over his shoulder, and saw a man who was so massive he didn’t even look real. He made Tombstone and Prowler, who were also supervillains, look like toys beside him. When Miles made eye contact with the Prowler for a split-second, the eyes in the purple mask went wide, but Miles was already looking over at Tombstone who had a gun, _a gun!_

Miles turned his head back around and yanked as hard as he could off the metal rebar, so hard that the whole pile of concrete groaned ominously.

“Don’t try to pull, you’re making it worse!” Spider-Man hissed quietly. “Relax! Slow your breaths! You have to—” Another terrible cough.

Miles could barely make out that Spider-Man was saying words at all over the rushing of blood and _die die die die die_ in his ears.

Another cough and then a weak chuckle. “Uh, hey Kingpin, I thought maybe the kid was with someone from your crew. Better check with all of them. Maybe it’s Take Your Child to Work at the Particle Collider Day.”

“Joking until your last breath. Which isn’t gonna be too long from now, huh?” Kingpin reached past Miles and yanked off Spider-Man’s mask.

Beneath the mask was a 20-something white guy with a prominent nose, who winced and blinked his blue eyes again, groaning, “Oh, that’s a no-no.”

 _Relax, relax, relax, relax, relaxrelaxrelaxrelaxrelaxahhhhhhhhhhhh!_ Miles’s attempts at deep breaths were only making him hyperventilate now as he felt the ridiculously menacing presence of Kingpin right over him. He forgot what Spider-Man had said in his panic and just pulled as hard as he could on the rebar again. This time the concrete moved slightly and a shower of dust fell over them all.

“The harder you pull the more you’ll stick,” Spider-Man said, rasping and thick but not giving up.

“I’ll take care of the kid, sir,” came a deep, distorted, semi-mechanical voice, and Prowler’s enormous clawed gloves appeared from under his armpits and pulled on him, but the concrete didn’t even budge.

“Cut his hands off if they’re not coming loose,” suggested Kingpin.

_He’s gonna cut off my hands I’m gonna die I’m gonna DIE—_

“Kingpin, he’s just a kid,” Spider-Man pleaded, “he’s somebody’s Richard—”

“Don’t you _dare_ say his name!”

_BANG._

Kingpin brought his hands down, and before Miles’s horrified eyes, Spider-Man’s chest crumpled inwards. The concrete _behind_ Spider-Man crumpled inwards, the blow was that powerful; and as Prowler’s hands yanked on him again, the piece of rebar came loose from the pile of concrete and suddenly Miles, _still_ holding onto that piece of steel, was being held aloft under the armpits like Simba in the Lion King.

“Get rid of the bodies. Tombstone, you deal with Spider-Man. Someplace it’ll get discovered,” Kingpin said. “Prowler, you throw the kid’s body in the East River or something. I don’t want a reputation as a kiddie killer, even among our kind, y’know? Some people draw the line there. But not you, right?”

“No, sir,” Prowler said, and though Miles tried to squirm, he couldn’t escape. Prowler easily carried him away, back towards the tunnels.

He was still struggling when Prowler pulled him into an alcove and said softly, still holding him firmly, “Listen if you wanna live. I’m gonna say ‘go’ and you scream as loud as you can like you’re being murdered. Then you go quiet and limp, eyes closed. Play dead. If you got it, yell ‘lemme go’.”

“Lemme go!” shrieked Miles.

“Okay, go.”

Miles screamed. He had so much pain and fear and disgust and agony inside him that it wasn’t acting at all. When his voice finally gave out, he discovered he’d dropped the piece of rebar at some point during his yell. He slumped against Prowler, who adjusted his grip on Miles as the boy went limp, closing his eyes.

“Good. Act dead no matter what, til I say otherwise.”

———

So much noise. Sounds of trains, traffic, people, motors; wind on his face. Miles was dissociating, retreating into a state of unreality, not reacting to anything, no matter how much his body was tossed around. He didn’t come out of it when everything went still and soft and quiet, either. He wasn’t anything and he wasn’t anywhere—

“Okay. You can get up now, Miles. You did good.”

Miles’s eyes jerked open, revealing the ceiling over his uncle’s couch. He didn’t move for a moment, then he sighed, big and relieved. “Oh my gosh, Uncle Aaron, you not gonna believe this, I had the _weirdest_ dream where—”

He stopped talking because as he sat up, Uncle Aaron’s face was there, alright, but the body attached to it was wearing the Prowler’s costume.

Miles’s stomach lurched, and he grabbed at his face, squeezing his eyes shut again. “No, no, wake up! I hate this dream!”

“It ain’t a dream.”

A hydraulic sound made Miles open his eyes again, and he saw the Prowler’s gloves coming off, revealing his uncle’s hands. The hands that taught him how to spray a perfect thin line with no drips, the ones that bandaged up his scrapes without making him feel like a little kid about it, the ones that showed him how to hit the punching bag without hurting his own hands. Those hands.

“You get hurt any? Pat yourself over, sometimes when you get that adrenaline spike you don’t realize you got hurt.”

This prompt to specific action allowed Miles to unfreeze from his shock, but he still felt like his movements were all jerky and unnatural as he moved his hands from his face to the back of his head, then his neck and down.

He paused for a moment as one hand hit the firm outline of the USB stick inside his hoodie. Uncle Aaron—the Prowler—was right there watching him. Miles hoped the man hadn’t noticed anything weird about the pause as he kept patting himself down, down his legs to his shoes.

Which were still untied.

“Nothing wrong?”

“Nothing wrong? Nothing wrong?! After that—nothing _wrong?”_ Miles laughed, then the laugh got a little hysterical, and when the Prowler—Uncle Aaron—frowned and took a step forward, Miles scrambled back on the couch, bumping his back into one of the speakers and making the plant on the top wobble.

Uncle Aaron—the Prowler— _he_ stopped, and lifted his ungloved hands slowly, holding them palm out. “Miles. We gotta talk about this. Why did you come back there on your own?”

“Why are you the _Prowler?”_ Miles challenged, stung at the absurd way that the man is taking an almost _scolding_ tone about this, like _Miles_ is the one in the wrong here!

His supervillain uncle frowned, the bare hands still up and steady. “Money.”

Miles waited a moment, but there was no more explanation coming. “That’s it? That’s all you gonna say about it?”

“It’s all there is to it. I can’t make money doing anything else, Miles. Not enough, anyway. And I’m… skilled.” He was still frowning, but less in concentration and more in sadness. “I’m sorry. I never wanted you to find out. I run in a dangerous world, Miles, and that’s why you gotta tell me why you went down there. Does anybody know you went down there?”

“I thought I dropped my keys out of my pocket down there.” A lie. Miles’s keys to his parent’s apartment were in his locker at school. “I didn’t want my dad to get mad at me for losing them… plus he said if I ever lost my key, he’d make me pay to have the locks rekeyed.”

“Yeah, that sounds like him.” He reached one of the hands up to rub his head, like he had a headache. “You shouldn’t go these kinda places without me.”

“I called you over and over, you never picked up! You can’t blame this on _me!”_

“I’m not. Miles… Fine, you right, forget it. I gotta figure out how to get you out of this.”

Miles felt furious, despairing tears pricking at his eyelids.

_“You can’t show anyone your face. He’s got everyone in his pocket.”_

It had sounded a little extreme, but now he’s being forced to see that his own uncle is in Kingpin’s pocket.

If even Uncle Aaron can’t be trusted anymore… then who could? His parents? Surely, _surely_ his mom and dad…

...but what about dirty cops?

No, his dad couldn’t be! His dad won’t even run a red light—

—his dad’s brother is the _Prowler._

_“No one can know!”_

“I gotta get back to school before they realize I snuck out again.” Miles stood up quick, and just as quick his uncle pushed him back into the couch.

“You crazy? Kingpin thinks you’re _dead._ You gotta hide here for a few months.”

“A few _months?”_

“I’ll tell your parents I don’t know nothing, then when everything’s calmed down we can say you ran away and that you called me—”

“You’re crazy.” Miles’s voice shook, and he glanced from the fire escape to the door, trying to figure out which exit would be easier to get to. He looked back at his uncle’s familiar thin face and felt a wave of disorienting vertigo, almost like he needed to barf, and struggled through it to say, “Kingpin thought you’d kill me, no problem. You killed people before?”

“When it’s the job. I don’t just kill for fun.”

The door. No, the fire escape—if he fell, maybe he’d be okay, he survived some crazy falls today. “You killed other kids before, or was I gonna be the first?”

The man looked pained, and closed his eyes for a second. Miles bolted.

He guessed wrong. Or maybe the Prowler could have stopped him from reaching either exit.

———

“I’m sorry, but I’m not gonna let you get hurt, Miles.”

Miles couldn’t answer even if he wanted to, because he was gagged, as well as being tied up in ropes and bungee cords, the whole shebang wrapped in a blanket like a swaddled baby in the middle of his uncle’s bed.

The Prowler was standing by the door with his mask and claws back on, so his voice was distorted again. “Don’t try to do anything stupid while I’m gone. I’m just gonna figure out where I can put you to protect you. It’s gonna be okay. Get some sleep, kid. I promise I’m gonna fix this.”

The light went out and the door closed.

Of course, as soon as the man was gone, Miles started trying to free himself; but some of the knots seemed to get tighter when he struggled, and soon he was in a panic, worried that he might have tourniqueted himself and was gonna end up losing not only the feeling in his limbs but the actual limb itself. Sometimes he cried, and eventually he fell asleep.

———

“My mannnnnn,” laughed a young guy sitting on a stoop at two in the morning, hanging out with a small group, “what the fuck kinda bullshit costume party were you just at? You look cold as _hell._ You gonna get needles in your feet, walking like that round here, my man.”

Peter B. Parker, shivering in his ripped up suit with bare feet on the freezing cold sidewalk, couldn’t even bring himself to fire back.

A woman on the stoop a little higher up, smoking a cigarette, said, “Leave him alone, he’s probably fucked up on some crazy shit if he can’t tell he’s freezing his ass.”

“It’s not a bad ass,” said another woman, and the assembled people laughed.

“Bit too old for that costume,” the smoking woman said dismissively.

“Seriously my man,” said the first man who spoke, “you need some help? I ain’t saying the cops, I mean, you know where the shelters are around here, right? Or the hospital?”

“St. Joe’s is doing that all night clothing shop thing tonight,” said the smoking woman, begrudging. “They ain’t gonna have shoes but he can get a coat at least.”

“Does he even understand? You speak English?” said another man. _“¿Se habla Español?”_

Not bad people. Peter said, awkward and stiff, “Where’s St. Joe’s?”

“It talks,” said someone, and there was laughter again.

St. Joe’s had a short, too-energetic young man in charge who told Peter to call him Damien in between speaking in rapid Vietnamese to other volunteers at the apparently ethnic parish.

“You so tall,” Damien told him brightly, “but I think we got you!”

They outfitted him with an army green coat that actually fits okay, and forced him to take gloves and a hat he didn’t want. They didn’t make him take off the mask.

“Sometimes we all wear mask,” Damien said with a shrug, and then went back to speaking Vietnamese for a moment to someone else, then said to Peter, “You can come back in the morning, breakfast, meet Father Nguyen. You Catholic? It’s okay if not, come anyway. Good breakfast.”

“Sorry, I can’t stick around.” _Really._

“Try these! Try!” crowed a female volunteer, bringing over two mismatched shoes.

“Where these from?” asked Damien.

“Donation box. But only one each.”

Damien sighed and looked embarrassed at Peter. “Sometimes donations are not helpful!”

The shoe and boot are off by a size but they’re better than going barefoot. “Thank you very much.”

Damien pushed a couple of pamphlets into his hands: lists of local shelters and resources, plus a holy card.

“I will pray for you, brother,” Damien said cheerfully as Peter turned to go.

“Thanks, I could use it.”

———

Miles woke up to the sound of the window being wrenched open. When he looked over, he saw a stunning silhouette of a girl, wearing a white, black, and pink costume that was like Spider-Man’s and yet very very different as well.

His head throbbed.

“You’re like me,” the girl said.

“Mmmhggghnnfff,” said Miles.

She stepped forward and undid his gag, then got to work on the blanket and ties.

“The Prowler lives here,” said Miles in an urgent undervoice, “I don’t know when he’s going to come back—”

“The Prowler?” the girl said, breaking ropes with astonishing ease. “He tied you up? Why didn’t he just kill you?”

Her voice is familiar somehow. “He’s my uncle,” Miles said miserably.

“Oh, that sucks,” the girl said, sympathetic but also focused on the task at hand. “Don’t worry. I’m gonna get you out of here and then we can work on solving this mess together.”

“Wilson Fisk—Kingpin, he killed Spider-Man last night,” Miles said as he tried to wiggle feeling back into his fingers and toes. The girl seemed about half done with the ropes. “He built a super collider, he’s trying to do something crazy and Spider-Man said it could make a black hole—”

“Oh, so _that’s_ how I got here,” the girl said, and tsked. “Figures it would be Alchemax causing me problems even in another dimension. I hate their guts.”

_In another dimension…?_

“Spider-Man gave me an override key,” Miles hurried on as he finally managed to break his arms free, “I have it in my pocket.”

He reached into his hoodie pocket and then froze as he felt jagged metal and plastic.

“You okay Miles?” said the girl, and her saying his name suddenly snapped things into place.

_“Gwanda?”_

She slapped her hand down over his mouth and said, “Not here—your uncle may have a security system. Actually I’m sure he does. We should go—wait, you’re not gonna be able to swing out, huh.”

“...No.”

“Okay. Okay. We’re still cool… you can get on my back.”

She turned around and squatted a little in the classic “time for a piggyback ride” posture.

Tamping down another hysterical laugh, Miles clambered on.

———

Aaron’s headset intoned _BREACH - BEDROOM WINDOW, 8:05 AM,_ and the criminal swore as he wove his bike dangerously through traffic. He was fifteen minutes away, minimum.

He got there in sixteen minutes and found his precious bird had flown, the binds and blankets left in a mess, but he still let out a moment’s sigh of relief, because what he’d been most afraid of was that he’d find that Kingpin had sent someone else to finish what Aaron said he’d done.

Miles gone, he could fix. Miles dead…

If Miles were to die…

No. It wouldn’t happen. He wouldn’t let it.

He watched his security tapes and saw a woman in costume that he’d never seen before go in through his window. The security breach had turned on sound recording, so he was able to listen to his nephew telling Gwanda—the hell kind of a name was Gwanda, some kind of off-brand Good Witch of the South?—that his uncle was the Prowler and that Kingpin had a super collider.

_“Spider-Man gave me an override key.”_

Oh, damn that boy. Damn that wonderful, pure-hearted boy. He was gonna get himself _killed._

The girl took his nephew on her back and went out the window, four stories up, so she had some kind of crazy spider powers too.

Crazy spider powers…

_“You’re like me,” the girl said._

_Miles yanking on that metal bar so hard that the whole damn thing shook, when even with his suit’s help Aaron couldn’t budge it._

_Spider-Man said, “The harder you pull the more you’ll stick,” his voice thick like he had blood in his lungs._

Oh, shit. Oh _shit._

He hadn’t seen it because he hadn’t _wanted_ to see it. He’d been so laser focused on his need to get Miles away from Kingpin that it hadn’t occurred to him… he’d just thought that some of Spider-Man’s web gunk got on Miles and made him stick. Aaron knew from bad experience how tough that shit was to break if you got caught in it, again, even with a powered suit. He’d thought it was just that his nephew was only a boy, and when he’d pulled on him, he’d been too busy trying to figure out how he was going to escape with both their lives to realize how strange it was that Miles could make the debris shake and Aaron couldn’t.

_“I lost my keys… I called you over and over.”_

And Miles had, Aaron had seen the missed calls. Miles was such a sweet boy, such a _good_ boy, of course he wouldn’t have gone back in the tunnels by himself without waiting even one day for Aaron, just for some keys that he wouldn’t have needed until the weekend anyway.

It would have had to have been something way more urgent than that.

Something like a radioactive spider, something that got warped by Kingpin’s crazy machine and crawled over just a hundred yards or so to bite his innocent nephew.

Welllll _fuck._

Aaron knew he ought to be freaking out. But a part of him—an unexpectedly enormous majority of him—was suddenly filled with a twisted pride.

_My nephew, the new Spider-Man. Hell yeah. Miles can do it—he’ll do it better than Parker did, he’s got it in him, he’s amazing and he’s still only a kid…_

Then the bubble popped because shit, Miles is a _kid_ and if Kingpin finds out that the boy who saw distinguished businessman Wilson Fisk murder Spider-Man with his bare hands is still alive, the crime boss will stop at absolutely nothing to destroy him. He’d already blown a billion dollars on this crazy collider…

Trying to keep himself calm, Aaron pulled out a phone and texted the contact that he was using to arrange a safe house that he may not need it after all. Then he went into his kitchen and started making himself breakfast. A quick meal, shower, nap, and then make plans to find his nephew.

As he ate a spoonful of cereal, Aaron actually grinned and shook his head. Wild. He’d spent his whole criminal career trying to avoid one Spider-Man. Now he was actually going to have to go and hunt down the new Spider-Man, and it would be to _save_ him.

Aaron didn’t do that hero shit. He didn’t care about anybody… except Jeff and Miles.

“Hero shit here I come,” Aaron murmured, and sipped at a protein shake.


	2. Chapter 2

Miles sat with his head in his hands on the dirty roof of the Trust Us Bank building, looking at the broken override key between his shoes. A hand tapped on his knee, and he looked up at Gwanda, who had taken her mask off and lowered her hood.

“Okay, so, let’s start at the beginning one last time. My name is Gwen Stacy…”

When she had finished recounting her backstory, Miles said, “I like your haircut.”

“You don’t get to like my haircut,” Gwen said coldly.

_Right. She doesn’t do friends._

_“No one can know.”_

“So what do we do now?” Miles said, looking down at the broken USB stick again. “I don’t know how to do any of that spider stuff like you do…”

“I can teach you. C’mon. First thing, we gotta get you a costume.”

“Really?” Miles looked up with a twinge of hope, an emotion he’d not been sure he’d feel again ever. “You think you can teach me?”

“Well, I am older than you. Fifteen months. And like I said, two years as Spider-Woman, so, I know how everything works… basically.” She stood up. “C’mon. A costume.”

“How about breakfast,” Miles said, grabbing the broken override key and standing up.

Gwen laughed. “Yeah, sure. Gonna need the energy.”

———

“There’s no way that one’s going to fit you,” Gwen said, pulling the package out of his hands and putting it back on the shelf. “It’s better to get an adult size and then take it in if it’s too long. Believe me, you do _not_ want to be worrying about your pants splitting.”

Miles obediently took the adult sized costume she grabbed instead, even though it was going to be nearly all the money in his wallet.

At the till, the cashier, an elderly man, sighed as he rang the costume and said, “I’m gonna miss him. We were friends, you—”

He cut himself off and stared at Gwen, who had just turned back to the till from looking up at a bunch of wigs on mannequin heads.

“Well I’ll be damned, I’m seeing ghosts today,” the old man laughed, and went back to ringing up the costume.

“Huh?” said Miles.

“Sorry,” the old man said with a smile towards Gwen, making change at the same time. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, young lady. Just a hell of a coincidence that on the day Peter died, I see a girl who looks just like Gwen Stacy used to… her hair was quite a bit longer, though. But I suppose that’s how the kids like to wear it nowadays.”

“Who’s Gwen Stacy?” asked Gwen Stacy.

“Well I guess you’re too young to have heard about it,” the man said, looking sad now. “Was about… six, seven years ago, now? She was kidnapped and Spider-Man tried to save her, but sadly she died in the rescue. Maybe I’m seeing resemblance that isn’t there, with Peter on my mind today.”

“Ohhh, I remember when that happened,” said a man’s voice behind them, and they turned to see another man in line, looking excited. “I watched it live on TV! Her neck snapped!”

“Oh my _goodness,”_ said a woman in line, clutching her hands over the ears of her child, “there are _children_ here!”

Now Gwen was the one looking like she’d seen a ghost, and Miles grabbed his receipt and change from the old man in a rush. “Okay, thanks. Sorry about your friend.”

“So in this universe,” Gwen said as they walked down the sidewalk away from the shop, but Miles got the feeling she wasn’t really talking to him, _“I’m_ the one who died…”

Miles walked alongside her without saying anything for a few minutes, then said, “Where are we going?”

Gwen stopped abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk and someone behind them nearly walked into her a few seconds later, swore at her, and then walked on.

Miles moved over closer to the building. The display in the window was all televisions showing the news of Spider-Man’s death, again, or maybe still.

Gwen stared at the televisions, where a newscaster was speaking, captioned _MARY-JANE PARKER, WIDOW OF PETER PARKER ALIAS SPIDER-MAN, HAS RELEASED A STATEMENT THAT SHE INTENDS TO ARRANGE A PUBLIC FUNERAL WHERE ALL OF SPIDER-MAN’S ADMIRERS CAN PAY THEIR RESPECTS BUT IN THE SHORT TERM REQUESTS THAT FANS PLEASE RESPECT HER NEED FOR PRIVACY IN THIS TIME OF GRIEF…_

Despite the text, in a split window the news broadcast was showing a red-haired woman with a folder held in front of her face being assisted by some men to move from a car to a front-door while cameras flashed at her. Such blatant hypocrisy.

“Poor MJ… and she doesn’t even have me… the other me…” Gwen put her hand to her head. “My head hurts.”

“Yeah, this multiple dimension stuff is making my head spin too,” Miles said.

“No, I mean, my head _hurts…”_

Before Miles’s horrified eyes, Gwen’s entire body became engulfed for about two seconds in a shifting kaleidoscope of light, her strangled gasp distorted and twisted as different parts of her body moved in all directions before snapping back into reality, leaving her bent double and panting.

“Oh crap,” said Miles, “are you okay?”

“Did that _look_ okay?!” Gwen hissed, then straightened up. “We don’t have time to just stand around. Let’s get you in that costume because we’re going to have to hustle for step two.”

“What’s step two?” said Miles, already hustling to follow her.

“A hide out,” Gwen said, power-walking like she actually had a destination in mind now. “We can’t stay where I was staying, I was at a women’s shelter. Any shelter is too high risk now, you’ve already been reported missing and I’m sure they’ll report me missing too, so we’ve got to find an alternative. I think we’re gonna have to get out of the city altogether.”

“Leave New York?! But we have to stop Kingpin.”

“We’re not going to be stopping anybody without a working goober,” said Gwen, making a sharp left. “Plus you said yourself you don’t know how to be Spider-Man. We can work on the second thing while we make our way to fixing the first thing.”

“You lost me.”

Gwen gave him a look. “We gotta get to Alchemax and make another one. They’re in the Hudson Valley. I can teach you to swing on the way there.”

———

So when MJ gave her famous speech at Peter Parker’s funeral, solemnly looking at the camera and saying, “We’re all Spider-Man, and we’re all counting on you,” Miles was roughly forty miles away in a state park, looking over Gwen’s shoulder at her phone’s tiny stream of the funeral.

His own phone was back in his uncle’s apartment, presumably; his uncle had confiscated it and doubtless taken it somewhere else so that when Miles was reported missing he couldn’t be tracked to the Prowler’s apartment through it.

“They’re counting on me,” Miles said, still uncertain.

“They’re counting on us,” Gwen said, bumping his shoulder with her fist. “They just don’t know yet that we’re coming to save them.”

Miles sighed and stretched. “I dunno, Gwen. I appreciate the training but I don’t know if I can really do this. I mean, I can’t exactly take your webshooters, you need them. And where we gonna get the stuff to make another one here in the woods—ask Rocky and Bullwinkle if we see ‘em?”

Gwen giggled. “Oh, come on, Miles, obviously we would ask Mr. Peabody, he was the genius on that show.”

Miles smiled back. He didn’t want to overplay his hand, but he thought that Gwen was maybe warming up to him a little, even though she was very strict and humourless during actual training, barking orders at him with her hands on her hips with her back ramrod straight.

“You think the food’s ready?”

“Not even close,” Gwen snorted.

Miles sighed, looking longingly at the foil packets set up over their campfire. “You sure?”

“I have a timer going, but if you wanna check whether Spider-Man in this universe can eat raw chicken, be my guest.”

“I am just sooooo hungry after all that jumping you had me doing today.”

“Well, you were better than yesterday. I think there’s a little bit of trail mix left, if you don’t wanna wait.”

“You wanna play a game?”

Gwen gave him a look.

“Like, keep my mind off my stomach,” Miles protested. “Tag or something.”

“Tag? Are you fourteen or four?”

“Maybe you’re just worried that fifteen months older won’t be enough to keep me from catching you.”

Gwen laughed and tossed her asymmetrical hair, relaxed. “I don’t have anything to prove. It’s not like—”

And then she was _off._ Boom. That girl could _go._

Miles scrambled to his feet and ran after her, shouting, “That’s cheating!”

———

Peter watched his own funeral from a nearby roof.

_Well, Damien, maybe I was Catholic after all._

He’d wondered, before he’d seen her, if maybe this MJ would have brown hair or something, since the other him had blond, but no. She really looked exactly the same as the original.

Well, maybe that just made sense. The dead Peter Parker was a perfect him, but MJ was already perfect. There was no improving her.

God, how had he ever pushed her away?

This MJ was saying all kinds of wonderful things about the dead him, and about Spider-Man.

How long would it take for him to be noticed as missing in the other dimension? He didn’t have a day job since he went freelance. He lived alone. No living relatives. Friends that weren’t dead and he was still in contact with? Let’s see, there was…

Maybe they’d notice when he didn’t pay his rent. Wait, no, he had direct deposit set up, huh. It would take at least a few months for his bank account to drain.

People would notice that Spider-Man stopped patrolling, right? Hell, Jameson would probably throw a parade.

Alright, well that was motivation to get back to his own dimension. Piss off Jameson at least one more time.

The other MJ stepped away from the podium, and… the other Aunt May stepped forward.

Nope. No, he was not doing that.

Peter swung away.

———

Aaron got a small measure of luck in that, with Spider-Man supposedly eliminated, no witnesses, Kingpin got extra cocky and told Prowler that his freelance contract was terminated, pleasure doing business, don’t call us we’ll call you. He even put the final deposit in Prowler’s account with a bonus.

That was how his contract work with Kingpin always went; he wasn’t Kingpin’s employee full-time and that was how he liked it. Kingpin paid well, _very_ well, and on time, but the work was always dirty and dangerous. If Aaron had it his way, he’d do nothing but clean heists, without so much as a security guard getting a bruise; he wasn’t some kind of sadist who killed for pleasure.

Although it had been a long time since killing someone had left him feeling guilty…

God. Hell, that proved it. Even in his own mind, he was thinking that _killing_ someone didn’t make him feel guilty anymore.

_Remember that first heist? I didn’t even kill that guy and I felt so bad after…_

_“You killed other kids before, or was I gonna be the first?”_

Aaron closed off the memory as he pulled open the door to another store.

He’d managed to get a security tape from near his apartment building that showed a flash of the costumed woman and Miles heading a certain direction, and he had followed that lead to another until he hit a dead end, and now he was beating the pavement with the official “Have You Seen This Boy?” flyer for Miles.

Jeff and Rio were absolute wrecks, of course, and it had unfortunately gotten a certain amount of news coverage because an 8th grader vanishing from his public school dorm was tailor made for clickbait. It brought up issues of public school dormitories, lottery schools, and a whole lot of other bullshit. If Miles had been a regular missing kid of course he would have wanted as much coverage as possible, but Kingpin knew his real name. Maybe there was only a small chance that Kingpin would see the coverage, see the name of the missing child’s father, and make the connection between Jeff Davis and Aaron Davis, but a small chance was more than he wanted to risk.

“How can I help you?” the old man at the collectible shop said cheerfully.

“Hey how you doing,” Aaron said, letting his stress out, because he had plenty of reason to be stressed. He held out a flyer. “My nephew’s missing, and we got a tip that somebody saw him in this neighbourhood—”

“Oh my, that’s the boy that was with the girl who looked like Gwen,” said the old man, picking up the flyer.

“You think you saw him? When? What’d he do? Who was he with?”

The old man looked up, and suddenly Aaron’s stomach dropped, because even though the old man was just looking at him with a neutral, serious expression, Aaron was gripped with the inexplicable sense that the old man didn’t like what he saw. And what was worse, that he was right not to like it.

“I got a lot of traffic in here because of Spider-Man’s death,” the old man said. “I think I saw your nephew. Couldn’t say what day. I’m sure he was buying some Spider-Man merchandise. I went through all my stock, nobody was buying anything else.”

“You said he was with a girl?”

“With, schmith…” The man shrugged. “It was crowded, who’s to say… I suppose I’ll call the police number if I remember anything else.” He smiled at Aaron. “Sorry I can’t be more help. I’ll pray the boy gets back to his parents soon, of course. Any boy who’s a fan of Spider-Man is growing up right. You know, some people ask me if I’ve ever considered carrying villain merchandise… Vulture, Rhino, Green Goblin, and… the rest. But that’s not the kind of customer I’m after here. Not the clientele I want, you know? Besides, it’s a very flaky market, villain fans. Some of them will change their minds about villains, go back to heroes, and then I’ll be here for them. After all, I get new hero merchandise in every day.” He made a kind of waving gesture, then turned to tidy an already neat shelf.

Dismissed.

Aaron walked out with a vague sense of insult coupled with puzzlement. It was impossible that the old man knew he was the Prowler… wasn’t it?

What the hell was he ranting about?

Senile old man. Maybe he hadn’t even seen Miles.

Wait, Gwen… Gwanda?

Too close to be a coincidence.

Gwen… Gwen?

Feeling a nagging sense of familiarity, Aaron pulled out his phone and Googled “Gwen spider man.”

News articles, some with pictures. A girl whose rescue went fatally wrong. A young lady’s life cut short. There were recent articles, too, revisiting the tragedy in light of the news that Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Apparently he was dating this Gwen at the time of her death and it had been a targeted kidnapping.

Okay it was a weird thing for his nephew to make a connection with a superhero Gwanda and this old man to say he saw Miles with a girl who looked like this Gwen. But how did that help?

A clone, maybe? Wasn’t that one of Octavius’s other interests?

Maybe he should tell Octavius he’d changed his mind about participating in that research.

———

“I feel like we’re doing a little more stealing than I expected as superheroes,” Miles complained as he tried on the labcoat Gwen had shown up with at their new campsite.

“It’s not theft, it’s an advanced payment on saving the world.”

Miles grinned at her. “Those glasses with that haircut make you look like a hipster.”

Gwen rolled her eyes. “Intern. The word you’re looking for is intern.”

Miles donned his own pair of black rimmed glasses with plain glass lenses. “How about me?”

“Take Your Child To Work Day,” Gwen said, then frowned when Miles flinched. “What?”

“Nothing. So when do we infiltrate?”

“I gotta get us fake credentials. We’ll be hitting the library in Poughkeepsie to use their computers. Your job will be running distraction if I start glitching.”

He ended up being wayyyyyyy more of a distraction than either of them wanted.

Some busybody called the cops on suspicion of Miles being a truant. Suddenly Miles had state police asking him for ID, which he didn’t even have, not that it would have made a difference because he _was_ being truant, and oh my gosh if he gets arrested for truancy his dad is going to kill him and his mom will be so embarrassed and he can’t let them _see_ him like this—

“Hey, where’d he go?”

The cop was staring right through Miles, and when Miles looked down, he could stare right through himself too.

“How he’d run, we were looking right at him!” demanded the cop’s partner, looking around wildly. “Which way’d he go? Who saw him go?”

Gwen, lurking nearby, looked pretty freaked out too, but she said loudly, “Well I hope he ran _home.”_

Miles didn’t know what the hell was going on but he could take a hint. He booked it back to their campsite.

Not long after, Gwen arrived, cautious and in her full costume. “Miles? You here?”

“I’m right here,” said Miles. “I’m invisible but I don’t know how to turn it off! You didn’t tell me Spider-Man can turn invisible!”

“I can’t turn invisible,” she said. “Have you tried turning yourself off then on again?”

“That’s not funny!”

“It’s a little funny.” She pulled her mask off. “What were you feeling or thinking when you turned invisible?”

“I was wishing I wasn’t there.”

Gwen’s face softened. “You still wish you weren’t here, right? I get it, but try faking the will to live like the rest of us.”

Miles took a breath and tried to fake wanting to be in this situation, and it wasn’t working, until he changed tactics to _I want to be here so I can save the world._

“Welcome back to being seen,” said Gwen.

———

Peter was lost.

He couldn’t follow any lead because every lead meant following the shadow of his other self. Go to Empire State University? Talk to MJ? Talk to Aunt May?! Hell no.

And the longer he stayed in this other dimension, and the more his very existence became painful.

It felt like this was some kind of Ebenezer Scrooge bullshit, that he was being shown a world where he died and blah blah blah moral lesson of the week, but whoever it was who was writing the thing had lost interest in him. Weren’t there supposed to be three spirits or something?

For lack of anywhere else to go, he found himself lurking in the graveyard hosting the corpse of his other self. He told himself he was watching who came to visit, but he didn’t believe his own lie. Actually he was more thinking that if he was going to dissolve, maybe if he did so near his other self’s body he could share his final resting place.

Ghoulish, literally.

“Hey,” came an aggressive young female voice, and he froze. “The cops told me they warned you not to be in the cemetery after ten but you keep coming back. Are you doing this for MeTube or something? You think it’s funny, to hang out near my husband’s grave wearing a destroyed version of his costume? Or are you trying to scare someone? Well, you’re not funny and you don’t scare _me.”_

_Oh, it’s the Ghost of Christmas Fucked._

And the trouble was he couldn’t even webshoot his way out of this. He might give her a heart attack.

Slowly he turned around.

Those familiar big blue eyes widened in the glow of the floodlight.

 _God, if she’d had kids with_ this _Peter, they would have had pretty blue eyes just like her,_ Peter suddenly thought.

“Peter?” she choked out.

“Hey MJ,” he said weakly. “This is gonna sound weird, but I’m pretty sure that I’m from an alternate dimension.”


	3. Chapter 3

In his own universe they had sold MJ’s car when they got married to pay for their honeymoon, but in this universe he got into the passenger seat of a dinky smartcar with her. He was too tall to be comfortable in it but right now he was incapable of being comfortable anywhere.

“Okay,” she said the second the doors were closed, “tell me everything.”

“Uhhhh…” Peter rubbed his forehead. “You’re really gonna have to be more specific.”

“Well where do I start? You’re like…  _ him. _ But you’re different… when did you come here?”

“The night he died. This kind of… swirly portal thing opened in my ceiling and sucked me in.”

“But that was weeks ago. What have you been doing… oh my God, don’t tell me you’ve been wearing the same suit all that time.”

“It’s very—”

“Breathable fabric, MJ,” she said in unison with him, and Peter blinked.

MJ worried at the knuckle of her right thumb. “Sorry. But it’s just crazy. You rub your forehead the same way and you speak the same way and… what happened to your nose?”

“A drone flew into my face.”

She laughed, then said, “God, why am I laughing, this isn’t funny… so you’ve really just been hanging out in the graveyard like a creep all this time?”

“Mostly… didn’t really…”

“Why? That  _ doesn’t _ sound like Peter. He would have been investigating his death… I mean… if it was the other way around.”

_ The other way around would have been much better. _ “Well, in this particular case, investigating with my own face was out, and investigating with the mask was even more out, so that didn’t leave a lot of options,” Peter hedged, looking through the windshield at the bumper of the car parked ahead. “I thought maybe someone visiting the cemetery would give me another lead.”

He glanced over. She looked determined. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-nine.” Peter didn’t like where this line of questioning might go.

“Really?” she said. “So your dimension is… the future?”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you how that works. It’s 2018 here and it’s 2018 where I came from, but there are a lot of things different other than our ages and hair colours. In my universe MJ drove a Prius when…”  _ Oh and fallen at the first hurdle, Peter, wonderful. _

“When?”

“When we were dating,” he said with his eyes closed.

“Wow. Wow, this is crazy.” He could hear her shift in her seat. “I know it’s not really important but… wow. You said dating… did we not...”

_ Maybe if I keep my eyes closed she’ll think I’ve fallen asleep. _

“I guess in a universe where Gwen didn’t die, you’d have married her,” she said with a certain amount of wistfulness, and that startled his eyes open.

“Gwen died here too?” he said.

MJ swallowed, and nodded. “I guess that answers that. Who then? Betty?”

“No, I married you—I married MJ,” he corrected hastily, and he wanted so very very badly to leave it there, but MJ had that inquisitive expression that told him he was not going to get away with shit tonight. “But we’re divorced now.”

She recoiled. “Divorced?!”

Before he could decide how to respond to  _ that, _ she blushed and said, “I am  _ so _ sorry—that was—you’re your own person, obviously, and it’s none of my business, you aren’t actually—we don’t really even know each other—”

“Right, no, it’s fine—”

“It’s just—this is a lot, I mean I’ve been dealing with a  _ lot, _ and I got so  _ pissed off _ when I heard about this graveyard bastard mocking Peter and then I come down and it’s—you’re—you’re not—”

“It’s okay—”

“It’s  _ not _ okay, none of this is okay!” she shouted and then burst into tears.

“Oh shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say that, I’m not good with words—I mean I am but more like, you know, the bantering and the quipping, I can do that, like if you were a villain and I needed to insult you I’d be  _ all _ over that, but when you’re crying I’m just—”

If anything, she was crying harder.

“I can go,” he said desperately, “I can get out of the car and you can just act like you never saw me and I won’t go to the grave—”

He stopped because she had a fistful of his costume and had yanked him over enough for the centre console to dig painfully into his hip.

“You are not leaving me here like this, Peter,” she said through her tears. “I don’t know why you’re here, but you’re  _ here, _ and I am  _ not _ letting you just waltz off into the night.”

Peter breathed. She was so fucking gorgeous he couldn’t stand it.

_ She’s not MJ—she is, but she’s not  _ my _ MJ—and I couldn’t be less like her Peter. I’m just some fucked up middle-aged schlub. _

Still with her hand clenched tightly around his costume, blinking, she said, with careful slowness, “Where have you been sleeping?”

_ Shelters. Benches. Libraries. _ “I’ve been fine.”

MJ let go of his costume and turned on the car. “Then you can come stay with me and in the morning we’ll talk about how we’re going to find out who killed my husband.”

———

MJ was always an early riser. Waking up in an empty bed and then coming downstairs in their little Queens townhome to discover Peter, sometimes in just shorts and other times in a still dirty costume, sound asleep on the sofa bed in the front room, used to be a common thing.

In the dim early morning light, it was easy to fool herself that she was looking at her husband, even with the darker hair.

But she swallowed hard because it wasn’t. Unlike her Peter, sneaking in to the sofa bed because he didn’t want to wake her up after a night of crime fighting, she had tucked this Peter into bed herself, after shaming him into showering and putting on clean sweatpants and a hoodie.

_ Good thing I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of Peter’s stuff yet, huh. _

She walked over to the kitchen, poured ground coffee into the coffee maker and turned it on.

She hadn’t used the coffee maker since the wake. It made too much coffee for just one person.

MJ closed her eyes and steeled herself again. For an all too brief moment, she’d hoped last night that maybe the corpse she buried wasn’t real, like it was a clone or plastic surgery or something. God knows it wouldn’t have been the strangest caper she’d been through with Peter, for him to come back post mortem, fifteen years older and forty pounds heavier…

Okay, actually that probably would be the weirdest yet.

But it would be so much better than reality.

Oatmeal. Peter liked oatmeal with cinnamon sugar and butter.

She heard him stir as the oatmeal was just finishing, and waited for him to come to her.

The other Peter hovered awkwardly in the doorway. “Good morning.”

“Good morning. I made oatmeal and coffee.” She pulled out two mugs and offered him one.

“Thanks,” he said. “Um… do you have…”

He trailed off as she got a little container of cinnamon sugar from another cabinet.

“That cinnamon sugar?” he said, and moved to the coffee maker. “I guess it makes sense that we have the same tastes.”

They sat at the counter. MJ usually ate a lighter breakfast but today she made herself the same thing. It was an extremely awkward breakfast. The other Peter—she needed another way to think of him in her head. Beter, maybe, for brown-haired Peter. Beter looked, if anything, worse than he’d looked in her car the previous night, in terms of exhaustion and general depression. She mostly saw the top of his head as he ate with his shoulders slumped and head bowed.

“We should go to Peter’s shed and get you a new suit,” MJ said. “He had spares, plus some experimental suits.”

The top of Beter’s head nodded. “Right. It’s in the back?”

“The shed? No, it’s over at May’s.” She got up to take her empty bowl to the sink.

“No.”

She stopped. “What do you mean no?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said, rather limp in his tone. “...That’s not really gonna cut it with you, is it.”

“Yeah, it’s not.”

A long sigh that came straight from his soul. “My Aunt May is dead, and… her death was… difficult. It was hard enough seeing her at a dist—”

He stopped but too late. “When did you see her at a distance?”

“The funeral. God you’re inquisitive.”

“Well I am a reporter.”

He looked up at that. “You are? Huh… yeah, you’d be good at that…”

“What’s the other me do?”

Down went the head again. “She acts.”

“Really?” MJ had dreamed about being an actress as a child and had been in theatre clubs in high school and college, but never really considered trying to make it a profession. “Is she successful?”

“I think so… she does television, commercials, a lot of commercials, actually…”

“Good for her.”

Awkward silence again.

“This is going to…” Beter muttered, then snorted and gulped some coffee. “Fine. You know what? This is going to happen, isn’t it? Fine. Okay, sure, gonna see my dead aunt with my ex-wife, this is a thing that’s going to happen. Am I bothered? Would I rather not?! Who cares? Not the multiverse, apparently!”

MJ blinked. “Okay then… I’m just… gonna call May.”

But May ended up giving her problems too.

“I don’t think today will work, dear,” May said.

“You don’t have to be there to let me in, I know the combo.”

“Well but I’m having someone over to do the fence,” she said, “so I can’t have you bringing attention to the shed.”

“May, I don’t want to give details over the phone, but I am not coming over alone and I’m not coming just to reminisce. It’s important.”

“Oh, I see.” A short silence. “Yes, you’d better come then, dear.”

———

Aaron parked his bike in the lot at Alchemax but didn’t dismount.

Did he really want to do this?

Right now he was “out” from Kingpin’s orbit. If he agreed to Octavius’s terms, Kingpin was the one ultimately signing her cheques. And Kingpin was the kind who liked to know that he was getting what he paid for.

Plus he had no doubt at all that Octavius wouldn’t follow any limits with what she did to him or with the data she got from him. Not legal limits and probably not even the bounds of sanity. He was here with a hunch about clones, and he was gonna give some of his blood or whatever to her? How stupid could he get?

On the other hand, Miles was out there somewhere actively trying to bring Kingpin down. Aaron needed to find a way to get in between Miles and danger. Right now, he couldn’t get close to Miles.

That meant it was time to cozy up to danger.

———

“That’s my uncle’s bike,” Miles hissed at Gwen as they surveyed Alchemax from behind a big rock.

“Your uncle the Prowler?”

“No my uncle the dentist— _ yes _ my uncle the Prowler!”

“Well, you’re going to have to face him eventually,” said Gwen. Sympathetic but practical again. “I told you they were going to have defenses.”

Miles took a breath in and out. She was right. “But what if he told Kingpin about me? Kingpin’s already seen what I look like.”

“Nah. He wouldn’t do that. That’d be admitting he lied when he said he killed you,” Gwen said, and Miles’s lip twisted. “But… you know, it’s still a good point that someone might recognize you. There must have been a lot of scientists there when the collider exploded, right?”

“Yeah, I saw some.”

Gwen nodded. “Okay. Recalculating. Take the scientist disguise off, mask on. I go in through the door like we planned. You find a way into the vents from the roof and back me up, going invisible if necessary. Let’s try it one more time, okay? Go invisible.”

_ I’m not here. I’m not here. _

“That’s amazing,” Gwen said with some envy. “I wish I could do that too.”

“I wish I had a spider sense that told me where to go,” said Miles, and focused on being present.

“You still have that issue that your clothes go invisible but the stuff you’re holding doesn’t,” Gwen said. “I wonder why that is?”

Miles looked down at his hands, which were holding the glasses and labcoat.

_ I’m not here. _

The glasses and labcoat were floating in mid-air, and he couldn’t get them to disappear.

“Don’t push it,” Gwen said, “we don’t know yet if your ability has a time limit and if so how long you can stay invisible.”

“You’re right.”

“If we get separated, we meet back at the campsite. If we’re still separated after twelve hours… then keep going alone.” She put the glasses on. “Good luck, Spider-Man.”

“Good luck, Spider-Woman.”

With that, Gwen darted off to the parking lot and took up a businesslike stride. Miles held his breath as he watched her walk up to the door and hold up her lanyard to a card reader.

It worked—the doors opened and she went in.

Miles breathed a sigh of relief, and was about to skirt around the side to try to find an entry point, when the noise of an approaching car stilled him.

When the car got to the door of the building, Tombstone got out and opened the passenger door for Kingpin.

———

“Peter?” said the spitting image of his beloved dead aunt.

“Hey Aunt May,” Peter said with a forced smile.

“He’s from another dimension,” said MJ. “He thinks him coming here has something to do with what killed Peter—our Peter. He needs a replacement suit to investigate.”

Aunt May nodded as if this was all expected, and Peter said, “You don’t seem shocked.”

“Well,” Aunt May said, “at least you’re normal looking. I’m having to keep the others underground just so they don’t freak anyone out.”

———

“Have a seat,” Octavius said as she wheeled from one side of a desk to the other on a little stool.

Aaron looked around. The only chair he could see had obvious wrist and ankle restraints. “I’ll stand.”

She gave him a side-on smirk as she rummaged through a drawer. “Do you use any street drugs?”

“No.”

“Gambling?” She found a little soft-sided case and pulled it out. “An expensive mistress?”

“What’s your point?” The drug question could have had applicability to testing something on him, but he wasn’t here to answer questions about his personal life.

“When I tried to recruit you before, you never even let me get to the point of explaining what I wanted you to test,” Octavius said, unzipping the case, “and I know you just got paid for a big job, yet here you are. And you called me. Some kind of urgent monetary stressor is the only explanation. If it isn’t that…” She took out some kind of a swab kit. “Then I’m even more curious about what brings you here.”

Aaron reflexively blocked when she went for his mask, and she tutted.

“I need a cheek swab.”

Against his better judgment, Aaron lifted his mask just enough to reveal his mouth.

“Say ah.”

While she was prodding the inside of his cheek, an intercom crackled. “Ma’am, Mr. Fisk is here to see you.”

Octavius backed up with the swab, gave Aaron a suspicious frown as he pulled his mask back down, and walked over to a desk to place the sample into a dish. Then she walked back to her computer desk and hit a button. “Does he want me to come out?”

“No, ma’am, he’s on his way.”

“Does he know you’re here?” Octavius said to Aaron.

“I’d prefer he didn’t.”

“Hm.” She strode over to a wall and pried open a cabinet. “It won’t be dignified, but you can probably fit in here. Or you could duck behind my desk and he probably won’t notice. Mr. Fisk is effective in neither his observations nor his conclusions these days.”

Aaron did not think he would fit in the cabinet, and it would be just barely possible to come up with a reason for being under Octavius’s desk if he got noticed that way, so the desk it was.

———

Gwen squared her shoulders as she walked past Kingpin and the head scientist, who were arguing about when they could restart the collider. It sounded like both sides were being stubborn, but she still had to act fast.

She went to put her hand on the door to the head scientist’s office and froze a moment.

OLIVIA OCTAVIUS, Ph. D, MBE, FIEEE, FCIC, PPhys

_ Doc Ock is a woman here? _

No time to worry about that one—in fact even less time, because now she knew if she got caught it wouldn’t just be a simple matter of restraining an ordinary middle-aged woman. The last thing she wanted was to start a fight here. She opened the door, strode to the desk, looked down—

—and started a fight.

———

“I mean this is pretentious,” MJ heard Beter mutter as they descended into the base, but decided to ignore it, even when he also scoffed, “What is that, a golf cart?”

He stayed just as rude and bitter when they got down to the costumes. “A cape? For real? What was this guy thinking? The only thing that’s good for is getting caught on things.”

“There are also standard costumes, if you can fit into them,” MJ said, needled into rudeness herself.

“Are you seriously calling me fat?! Do you want me to solve this for you or not?” snapped Beter.

“You should want to solve it anyway!”

“You can come out,” Aunt May called up towards the top of the hideout, making the bickering duo look up. “It’s another one.”

———

“I’m not—hold on—wait—” Aaron tried to stop the furious attacks of the blonde girl, but she wasn’t having it.

Suddenly he was knocked across the room, impacting a wall of honours and awards hard enough to crack the metal and send the trophies toppling onto him.

“You okay?” said his nephew’s voice as Aaron, a little dazed, tried to turn over to see what was going on.

“Just grab the whole thing and let’s run, we don’t have time to—no, wait, we don’t need the monitor, are you dumb?”

A panel of the ceiling and a ceiling light were hanging precariously askew, so Miles—wearing a Spider-Man costume that was too big for him, the legs tucked into his sneakers and the sleeves rolled back—must have come down that way.

“Kingpin’s here too,” Miles said as he dropped the monitor with a crash.

The girl was whipping off her glasses, yanking on a mask in a hurry, when the door opened again, revealing Octavius, now looking much more menacing with her four biomechanical tentacle limbs ready to rumble.

“Spider-Man… and Spider- _Woman?”_ she said, pleasantly surprised. “Right on. Fascinating. I don’t suppose you’re here to chat, though. What a shame, but I guess I can still study your corpses—”

Aaron struggled to get to his feet as her limbs lunged out. The girl dodged despite carrying a computer, but Octavius got a grip around Miles’s neck,  _ no— _

An audible sizzle and a bright flash, and when Aaron blinked again, Octavius was out cold, with a bad, smoky chemical smell starting to waft into the room.

“How’d I do that?” gasped Miles.

“How come you get all the cool abilities?” complained the girl, jumping over Octavius’s fallen form without looking back to see if Miles was following.

Miles looked at Aaron, and Aaron lifted his hands, palms out, claws retracted.

Miles turned and ran after the girl.

———

“We can all have some lunch,” Aunt May said, “if you don’t mind helping yourself. Leave the plastic deli containers alone, though, those are kosher that I bought specially for Mr. Monochrome.”

“You’re Jewish?” said Peter, surprised, as he moved towards the fridge.

“Yes, sir,” said the black and white Peter, but with an aggression in his stance. “That a problem?”

“No, of course not, I’m Jewish too, I was just surprised, because the one here isn’t. And don’t call me sir, you sound older than I am.”

Monochrome Peter took his mask off, and wasn’t  _ that _ a mindscrew, seeing his own teenage face in living and breathing black and white. He readjusted his little round goggle-glasses. “I’m nineteen.”

“Nineteen, he says. I didn't sound like that at nineteen,” griped Peter, reaching into the fridge and grabbing a couple packs of lunch meat and cheese.

“Do you need kosher food too?” asked Aunt May kindly. “The deli isn’t far away, it’s no trouble to get more.”

“I don’t keep kosher,” said Peter, getting ready to make a sandwich. “Keeping up with difficult requirements has never really been a thing that I’m good at. Anyway, I’m just going to take a sandwich with me on the run—oh, nice, bagels.”

“But we need a plan,” said Peni. “We don’t know where to begin, and we can’t exactly go around in this world like you can, not without people knowing right away that we don’t belong here.”

Peter grabbed a bread knife. “Well we’re not going to get leads holed up here. You said that your guy thought there was a connection to Kingpin, right? And the earthquakes, they’re here in the city. So I’ll check out Fisk Tower, easy.”

“Reckless, not easy,” scolded MJ, getting in his way as he was going for the pickles. “You’re not going to discuss it with the rest of us at all?”

“I don’t know how your Peter did things, but in my universe, I do my Spider-Manning alone. Excuse me, I need pickles.”

MJ didn’t move. “Well that’s not only reckless but stupid. I investigated for Peter all the time—including for this.”

Peter paused, unpickled, thinking about another MJ.

_ “How can I be there for you if you always shut me out? How can you be there for me if I don’t even know where you are or what you’re doing most of the time?” _

MJ shifted and grabbed the pickles out of the fridge. “Here.”

“My MJ isn’t a journalist,” Peter said, taking the jar.

“Right, well, get used to my world, Tiger, because that’s the only way you’re getting back to the other one.” MJ grabbed the Russian dressing for him. “Here.”

“Thanks,” he muttered, because of course she knew what he liked on his sandwich.

“Fisk is spending big money on something hush-hush through Alchemax, I got that far,” MJ said, hiking herself up on the counter while Peni came through to the fridge. “Fisk is a psychopath, absolutely zero shame or morals. Do you know he sent me a gilded invitation for a benefit dinner at the Fisk Tower banquet hall in Peter’s honour tomorrow night?”

“He must be planning that as a cover for something,” said Monochrome Peter. “Does he have pigs on the take?”

“I’m right here,” said Spider-Ham, and Peter paused, because one of the meats he was layering on his bagel was ham.

“My apologies. I meant cops, dirty cops. If he arranges to have his cops working the security, that makes it easy for them to keep the lid on his shady business, see?”

“Or it could be a distraction from something happening elsewhere. Or a red herring,” said Peni.

“What do commie fish have to do with this?” said Spider-Ham. “Besides, it’s never  _ really _ a communist conspiracy. That’s always just a false lead.”

Everyone else stared at him.

———

“You run pretty good,” Gwen complimented him when they had finally outrun the un-super-powered, but well-armed, scientists of Alchemax.

Miles still hadn’t caught his breath, leaning against a tree trunk with his mask pulled up so he could gulp air better, breathing out big puffs of condensation in the frosty forest. He was giving himself a side sticker but he couldn’t help it.

“You almost don’t need to swing, you dodge and weave on the ground really well,” said Gwen, “but I’ll definitely draw you up the schematic for the webshooters and give you the formula for web fluid anyway. I don’t know where you’re going to get the materials, though. You’re gonna have to get an ‘in’ with some laboratory with more equipment than Visions.”

Miles nodded, managing to breathe through his nose.

“Speaking of ins,” said Gwen, “I have an idea about where we can maybe get a lead on them and hopefully get the new key too. My spider sense is telling me we should head to his aunt’s house—this world’s Spider-Man’s aunt, I mean. Maybe she’s got some of his equipment and we can use it?”

“That’s a great idea, Gwen,” said Miles. “That’s seriously a cool talent.”

“Yeah, well, cool talent, I mean what was  _ that?! _ Forget calling you Spider-Man, we should call you the Human Bug-Zapper.”

Miles stuck out his tongue. “I’m not going by Human Bug-Zapper.”

“We can call you Buggy for short. Hey!”

He faked her out with a snowball throw, then managed to catch her in the shoulder, and for a few minutes, instead of saving the world, all the two laughing kids cared about was getting in one more hit.

———

Octavius was rubbing her left forearm with her other hand, a small frown on her face, seemingly completely unbothered by Kingpin, who was ranting at her, Tombstone, and Aaron.

“You’re telling me two teenagers in bad costumes can just waltz in here and steal information about  _ my _ collider and you couldn’t do a damn thing to stop them?”

“They weren’t just any teenagers,” Octavius said, flexing her fingers then making a fist over and over, carefully. “The boy gave me an electric shock powerful enough to knock me unconscious and deactivate my limbs. I’ll need to build more electrical resistance into them, it doesn’t make sense, it should have been non-conductive…”

“No science BS,” growled Kingpin.

She looked up and said crossly, “I am a scientist, Mr. Fisk. You hired me for my science ‘BS’.”

Kingpin screwed up his face, failed to make a comeback, and abruptly turned to Aaron. “You. You didn’t get knocked unconscious. Why didn’t you chase them?”

“I’m not on the job,” Aaron said, having expected this. “I only play when I’m paid, Mr. Fisk, you know that.”

“Didn’t that girl attack you?”

“I didn’t take it personal,” Aaron said.

“I need to deal with this peripheral neuropathy in order to fix my suit,” said Octavius. “You all need to leave, if I’m going to get everything finished in time for the launch tomorrow.”

“Now you’re in favour of running it?” Kingpin said, suspicious.

“Given that those two junior spiders have taken the data they need to destroy our collider,” Octavius said, “the balance of risk/benefit has tilted. So yes. I’m now in favour.”

Kingpin grunted, but seemed to accept this. “Prowler. You’re hired again. I want those two brats found and stopped.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Fisk.”

Aaron felt Octavius’s eyes on him, but he walked out with Kingpin and Tombstone with ease. He already fully intended to find and stop his nephew—might as well get paid for it, as long as he could do it his way.


End file.
